Washington Post says do not pardon Snowden

The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.) Worse — far worse — he also leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations: cooperation with Scandinavian services against Russia; spying on the wife of an Osama bin Laden associate; and certain offensive cyber operations in China. No specific harm, actual or attempted, to any individual American was ever shown to have resulted from the NSA telephone metadata program Mr. Snowden brought to light. In contrast, his revelations about the agency’s international operations disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly “tremendous damage” to national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve?

CharlieBrown

I would say karma is when corrupt politicians get hit by a bus.

I can’t say it’s good that legitimate intelligence gathering got out, but it would be an unrealistically momentous task to stop that given the amount documents of the bad shit the spy agencies were doing on thier own citizens.

Having your own government agencies accessing and spying on citizens with fuck all oversight is terrifying when you think about it without partisan brown nosing glasses on. You just need to look at Russia to see how easy it is for a “democratic” government to turn on its own citizens. What steps would you national sychophants take if a green lead government decreed that you cannot earn over 100k a year and all properties beyond the family home has to be turned over to the state and that teaching religion to minors is illegal. Would you protest, would you take up arms? Would you feel comfortable that a spying apparatus exists to spy on you in the name of national security to prevent any public disharmony?

If we need to stop local terrorism perhaps we need to look at other options at the border. If rather discrimination at the border vs indiscriminate surveillance within.

In arguing that no public interest was served by exposing PRISM, what did the Post editors forget to mention? That the newspaper that (simultaneous with The Guardian) made the choice to expose the PRISM program by spreading its operational details and top-secret manual all over its front page is called … the Washington Post. Then, once they made the choice to do so, they explicitly heralded their exposure of the PRISM program (along with other revelations) when they asked to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

stephieboy

Yoza , not true actually . It was Snowden who made the decision to defect first to Hong Kong then accept an invitation to Russia and in the meantime leaking detail per above as well as others now well known to us.

All the WP was doing was reporting thus . Other media too including Fox and Breitbart .

Ashley Schaeffer

I’m sorry, but you’ll never convince me that the U.S. Government and the military-industrial complex it is beholden to, holds the moral high ground over Snowden. Snowden may indeed be a traitor, but he joins a long list of traitors from the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations. A pox on all their houses.

SPC

That exposing illegal spying of the American people means a prison sentence (Bush 43 and his FBI Director carried out an illegal action and all Congress did was to make it retrospectively legal and give its continuance authorisation – in legal impact any illegal action taken by government in the name of security is now possible on this precedent – it is now a nation where the government is no longer accountable to its own law) is why one also exposes the international stuff, so one can get asylum.

The USA gives asylum to those who oppose corruption in other nations and regards them as freedom loving heroes.

That the WP is prepared to apologise for the government shows how far they have strayed from the days of Watergate, and why they deserve Trump the lover of the Putin strong man.

PS. Snowden has made criticism of Russia’s government without losing his asylum.